“Thank you⁠— tu I mean; you begin first⁠—ever so much. It is such a pleasure to me that you needn’t do anything about Mme. de Guermantes if you’d rather not, this is quite enough for me.”

“I can do both.”

“I say, Robert! Listen to me a minute,” I said to him later while we were at dinner. “Oh, it’s really too absurd the way our conversation is always being interrupted, I can’t think why⁠—you remember the lady I was speaking to you about just now.”

“Yes.”

“You’re quite sure you know who I mean?”

“Why, what do you take me for, a village idiot?”

“You wouldn’t care to give me her photograph, I suppose?”